Slashdot Mirror

right here.

Does this look like a graph describing a system that has been working?

But since you asked for an specific citation, there are thousands of cities in america where the unwed birth rate for Black children is over 90%. For example Fremont, a city with a quarter of a million citizens where 100% of the Black children are born to unwed mothers. And this is a city where the sex-ed was so progressive two years ago that it included instruction in bondage. How is instruction in bondage supposed to prevent teenage pregnancy?

Big Stupid Gun [...] there are better CAS weapons in the toolchest -- Maverick

Look here.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

What are those just outbound of the landing gear pods?

The A-10 needs a full-length runway to operate from

Twaddle. They're designed to take off from a field or a section of Autobahn if necessary.

The appearance of Mayan emojis coincides with the downfall of the Mayan civilization! Don't repeat the same mistake! Stop emojis while we still can!

You US point of view isn't shared internationally. Know your rights and don't be an ass assuming everyone follows the same laws:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

The definition of private also varies widely depending on country (there are probably a few more measures now that drones exist and are cheap and ubiquitous).

As for the rest of your panacea arguments, the sad fact is most laws are passed because people abuse them without it. Having separate bodies making vs. enforcing laws makes for an essential barrier to limit making a law just for sake of it.

We have privacy laws because we don't want to be micro-scoped and shamed for being different. This is NOT a bad thing. We should be different, and we shouldn't be shamed if someone wants to do something against some social norm in their bedroom, or in their covered back yard. The laws in place attempt to strike balance between two unrealistic alternatives: Full surveillance where nothing is secret vs Complete autonomy where even just crimes cannot be addressed without violating one's personal refuge.

Place on the phase diagram of water where the cooling towers operate.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

In the green!!!!!!

Dude, I'm so sorry. I couldn't control my fingers. These things just happen.

Place on the phase diagram of water where the cooling towers operate.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Soviets had a lander survive for 14.5 seconds after touch down.

I'm not sure I'd label the Soviet lander "successful". It only sent atmospheric data back, and nothing decode-able about the surface itself reached Earth.

There were known dust-storms in the area. One theory is the wind swept up the parachute, still attached to the lander, and pulled it over so that it's antenna no longer pointed in the right direction.

Another theory at the time was that Mars had a kind of quicksand that swallowed probes. In case the same thing happened to the Viking landers, NASA had them automatically send a photo of a foot-pad back immediately after landing rather than the typical to-the-horizon scene photo.

In the very first photo, you can see dust fogging out the left side (it was slow-scan) because it hadn't settled yet from the retro rockets.

(Although the quicksand theory is probably wrong, later rovers did indeed have problems getting stuck in sand/dust.)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

It has to do with focused and diffused modes of the brain. In focused mode, you're using neuro pathways that are already established to perform a task you already know how to do. Diffused mode is where you're trying to subconsciously use untapped areas of your brain to gain that creative ah-ha moment to do something you've not done before. Most people can't be in both modes at the same time, much like optical illusions where you can't discern two different pictures superimposed in the same image. https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

While you need to perform these mini breaks you should only do them after focusing on a certain task for, say, 25 minutes to maintain productivity and keep procrastination from creeping into your workflow. Then you take a break to let your mind wander and allow your subconscious to use other areas to help gain insight on your overall task.

The following videos from Barbara Oakley explain it a lot better. She also explains why multitasking is not good for focused mode thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Google Talk (1 hour)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

TEDx Talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Here is a useful graph to look at. You can see the chunk of people he is talking about in the peak at the left. I'm not sure if it's fair to talk about them as two different groups (rich/non-rich), but you can see, if you were one of the people on the far left, it would seem like all the people on the right were together in the group of "those making a lot of money." It might seem impossible for you to get into that group, and it might seem unfair.

It helps to try to see both perspectives before starting an argument.

> if the probabilities are tiny enough

Its reasonable to assume that they are NOT that tiny, because we exist. More importantly, it is reasonable to assume that they are not tiny because of the diversification of life and the parallel evolution sometimes seen.

If your science relies on a really special case to happen, then it is pretty fucking fragile, and probably not really science. In all things, we have done pretty well assuming that there's NO special event happening. Gravity isn't unique to Earth. The earth isn't the only planet in the solar system. The sun isn't unique to this solar system. Stars aren't unique to the milky way. The milky way isn't unique to the local group. And so on.

> what someone might want to think or believe in

If you believe that there's a nonzero chance that we are the only sentient life in the universe across all time, then that is something YOU want to believe in, and are relying on a "one in gugleplex" chances to prove the case.

Remember, we aren't talking about OBSERVABLE intelligences, and certainly not ones we can interact with on any timescale. We are discussing the observable universe.

That means that whatever your guess for "how many intelligent societies should there be" was several years ago, you would have had to multiply it by a number greater than 1 several times over the years. Meaning that you'd have to be progressively adjusting your "odds for one intelligent species" down, down down down.

The chances of only humanity being an intelligent society are zero. Those odds are dust. The universe is *too damned big*. That's your only conclusion unless you believe in special creation. That's why I say, if we really WERE sure we were the only ones, the ONLY explanation left would some kind of supernatural action- an action outside of nature. Gods, a simulation, whatever the current zeitgeist wants to hypothesize all boil down to, life couldn't start without something else. Again, that's ONLY the case if you had magically gained the infallible knowledge that we were alone, which of course, we have not.

How many intelligent civilizations are out there? Were out there? Will be out there? You are correct that we can't guess the number, but our own existence and the LUDICROUS size and age of the universe means it isn't just one. That's impossible.

> we just don't fucking know shit

We know that other stars exist, other galaxies, other galactic groups, other superclusters. It's absurd.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

You are correct that we don't fucking know shit, however, over the overall field of astronomy. There's too little matter to explain the gravity we see in galaxies, so we have like 80% of matter being dark matter or something. Then we have the opposite problem at greater scales, so we have dark energy as 70% of everything. So there's 5% of the universe we can explain and 19/20ths of it is totally unknown. We could be in some fucking nature preserve for all we know.

But for "does life exist elsewhere", the answer is "yes, many times" or "no, and it exists here because X", where we cannot solve for X. Unless you have a good argument for X, then the answer is, yup.

Let's see what Wikipedia has to say:

Ireland: "While there are a number of political parties in the state, the political landscape has been dominated for decades by Fianna FÃil and Fine Gael, historically opposed and competing entities"

The current assembly seems to disagree with two party assumption as image from wikipedia points out. But then again, Ireland doesn't have first-past-the-post system (and so doesn't most of the countries on that list). My wild guess is that there is confusion around here about what first-past-the-post system means.

Oh and regarding your original statement:

In any first-past-the-post election system, you will end up with a two-party system.

I can't say you're wrong but I'd generalize it bit further: any single-seat district system (that first-past-the-post is example of) has the tendency of becoming two-party system.

Not exactly. Trade is a technical improvement as well.

Let's first talk about technological improvement, which you seem to understand. I just want to create the frame so we don't encounter an unpredicted communications issue.

Say you make 40 chairs in 40 hours. To buy a chair requires the payment of 1 hour's wage. Simple.

You find a new way to make chairs--maybe even just a new order of doing things with the same tools. That's technical progress (the economic term for development of new technology). You now make 40 chairs in 20 hours. To buy a chair requires the payment of 1/2 hour's wage.

So you still work 40 hours, you make 80 chairs. People don't need all these damned chairs. Using your technology, chair manufacture is revolutionized; 50% of all chairmakers become unemployed. (It's okay: they make up 0.1% of the workforce.)

Over time, the price of chairs falls. What I described above happens at different rates for different things; inflation makes it impossible to keep all costs relatively the same; and competition (not just chairs-against-chairs, but trying to sell things to a market with a limited amount of income from which to spend money--you're competing with *everything*, including the behavior of saving) drives prices down.

At this point, chairs are actually priced at half as much. Consumers have money left over to spend.

As it turns out, we can also make 40 cushions in 20 hours. Consumers have that 1/2 hour of wage left to spend. As a result, 40 hours now makes 40 chairs WITH CUSHIONS.

So that's technology: some people lost their job, costs came down, prices eventually followed, consumer buying power went up, bought more shit.

What about trade?

Let's say you can make 40 chairs in 40 hours; but China can make 40 chairs in 20 hours.

You can make 40 cushions in 20 hours; China can make 40 cushions in 40 hours.

So, you and China, each, can make 40 chairs with cushions in 60 hours.

You outsource all your chair manufacture to China; and China buys all their cushions from you. Now, together, you spend 40 hours making 40 chairs and 40 cushions. You just found a way to reduce the labor making 40 chairs with cushions from 60 hours to 40 hours.

That's technical progress. That's new technology.

While China is building all our shit, we're graduating doctors and IT professionals. We consume a lot, and have a lot of retail centers; and clothing, food, and the like cost a smaller proportion of our income. We're buying more and better products and services, including better healthcare.

The buying power per capita in the United States has increased thanks to shifting work into the hands of economies who have greater expertise and capability to do the work, and instead doing work at which we're more-efficient. That's new technology.

It looks different because you shifted 100 hours of work in the house doing everything yourself first to 80 hours of work spread across people in your local community, then to 60 hours of work spread across the region, then to 40 hours of work spread across the state, and now to even less spread around the world. A lot of it has moved out of sight.

The United States has a higher labor force participation rate than it did before 1970--and higher than other developed countries--and still has around 5% unemployment. We've had unemployment ups and downs constantly, even as far back as the 1890s. Between the 60s and 70s, we outsourced a lot to Japan; then Korea; about 20% of our outsource is to China now.

Sometimes, people try to compare unemployment to imports, to show one correlation or the other--for example, that unemployment falls as imports rise

And the cardinal 4 direction arrows are _where_ again in Unicode ??

We're not talking about general arrows, we are talking about a specific arrow. If you don't want to look like a fool, learn to read before replying, please.

You think it's more likely that Russian hackers conspired with Donald Trump to keep Hillary from becoming president by starting a DDOS on Newsweek? That is the nutty conspiracy theory.

BTW, that's a nice canard.
Not that I'm judging your propensity towards aquatic fowl or its food, but no one is claiming that Putin and Trump actually conspired - just that the Trump is an useful idiot for Putin and Palls.
No... Wait... YOU ARE THE ONE CLAIMING THAT!
Cause that's how you looney brain works. Conspiracies everywhere.

Oh... and BTW... Speaking of "more realistic theories"...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07...

Oh... Looney, Looney, Looney... Whatever would we do without duck fuckers and fish rapers like you?
Who would we laugh at? Cats? I don't THINK SO...

You think it's more likely that Russian hackers conspired with Donald Trump to keep Hillary from becoming president by starting a DDOS on Newsweek? That is the nutty conspiracy theory.

BTW, that's a nice canard.
Not that I'm judging your propensity towards aquatic fowl or its food, but no one is claiming that Putin and Trump actually conspired - just that the Trump is an useful idiot for Putin and Palls.
No... Wait... YOU ARE THE ONE CLAIMING THAT!
Cause that's how you looney brain works. Conspiracies everywhere.

Oh... and BTW... Speaking of "more realistic theories"...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07...

Oh... Looney, Looney, Looney... Whatever would we do without duck fuckers and fish rapers like you?
Who would we laugh at? Cats? I don't THINK SO...

This judge has started climate in hell.

Dante thought this was at the center of hell.

Nah, just use this guy. instead.

It's been tried before, on an impressive scale. Humans haven't figured out absolutely how to keep rats, cockroaches and bedbugs out of their domiciles, much less most persistent and clever pest of all: other humans.

It'd probably be worthwhile for the rich to consider what being rich actually means. It's not having a lot of gold. Gold through the ages has only been useful as specie because (a) it's pretty and (b) it didn't have much practical use other than being pretty.

What being rich means is having the ability to command the cooperation and compliance of other human beings.

So a bunker is only good for a couple of weeks or at most months of disorder. It's a place to go while someone on the outside is struggling to re-establish the status quo ante. So it makes no sense to build one unless you also invest in the stability of the status quo, because if those people trying to preserve society fail you're actually in a worse situation than other survivors when you come out of your bunker. The vast majority of your money will become only scare-quotes "money" if the legal framework in which debts and ownership exist ceases to function.

How do these groups justify their existence over 40 years after the junk science of "race" was completely debunked?

It's kind of the other way around. Evolution tells us that different environments create selection pressure for/against different traits, which causes species to differentiate into distinct haplogroups or entirely different species. Most everyone agrees that modern humans left Africa and spread throughout the world between 50,000 - 100,000 years ago. Now if I were to take any other animal, say a canid, and stick a bunch of them in northern europe and a bunch of them in Africa and then ask if you if it's possible that after 100,000 years we'd get very different animals descended from the common ancestors, you'd agree. And if I suggested those differences might be more than mere coloration, but extended to speed, strength, size, and even temperament and intelligence you would probably agree. But if that animal is man instead of a dog you'd call me an evil racist to suggest that perhaps the cold climates of northern europe selected against those humans who weren't intelligent enough to make long-term plans while the year-round abundance of food in Africa selected against the weak and slow but not against the unintelligent.

We're basically having the Scopes monkey trial all in reverse, where the "progressives" take as dogma the claim that mankind is special and stopped evolving the instant they stepped out of Africa.

The way the political left gets their power is by first declaring that different groups are equivalent (without evidence or proof), enforcing this false equivalence as a moral issue (you're not just wrong but evil and morally repugnant if you don't agree), then pointing out the differences in outcome between these groups (actually caused by their biological differences, not deliberate actions), but since you've already accepted the false equivalence, the only explanation must be that the more successful group is oppressing the less successful group. This justifies giving political power to the left in order to correct this injustice. If you recognized the fundamental inequality of ability, there would be nothing to do and the left would have no power. It would just be the way it is.

For instance, in the United States the average IQ for blacks is 85, 92 for Latinos, 100 for whites, 108 for asians, and 115 for Ashkenazi Jews. This correlates very well to income levels for each group. In the US the median incomes for Jews is the highest, followed by Asians, then whites, then Latinos and then blacks. When confronted with this fact, politically motivated leftists will "debunk" the research by attacking the researchers, attacking the tests, and generally by making a bunch of hysterical and fallacious arguments. They then cite each other as proof the research has been "debunked" when in fact it hasn't, and any points they may have had (like for instance the idea that the IQ tests themselves are biased towards one group or another) have been addressed and either explained or corrected. But the results still stand.

It would be nice if the left would acknowledge this and stop calling society (and whites particularly) evil because, say, the proportion of engineers working at FaceBook who are black doesn't match the proportion of blacks in society. That's basically impossible because when you look at the distribution of intelligence by race a much smaller proportion of blacks have the, say, 120+ IQ required to get through engineering school than whites or asians. No societal injustice is taking place, it's just that bitch Mother Nature.

So if you want to know how these groups justify their existence, it's because the evil racists are factually correct and the leftists deny basic evolutionary biology because without their false premise of innate equality their ideology falls apart, and no one will give them power anymore.

In highschool I had some variation of this (from here) memorized as a number and would convert it to binary before every damn physics/math/trigonometry test.
Don't forget to 'shred -u' your files after doing that. nothing is safe.

Horse:
Many Muslims (like some Christian sects) consider pictorial representations of the human figure as violating the prohibition on graven images. As with those iconoclastic Christian sects that prohibition is most strictly observed when it comes to religious figures, possibly because of the quasi-worship of Christian saints Muslims witnessed among German knights in the Holy Land, which must have struck them (as it would later Protestants) as a kind of polytheism.

That's why when you look at the massive, elaborately decorated mosques you won't see a single human or animal figure. Instead you'll see elaborate geometrical figures and highly stylized calligraphy, which are the main visual form of Sunni artistic expression. To find any sort of art depicting people one must look to Shia dominated areas, such as Persia (Iran), which boasts many fine examples.

The universe is large, little man, and full of endless wonders; the time you have to fill your mind with those wonders is short.

It's KDE 3 that's mocked up to look like macOS. See: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

why do you fools keep quoting actors when trying to mock science?

also, the damage of acid rain is pretty clear and indisputable: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

and that's just on statues, not counting the increased PH of lakes and streams and the effect of that on the species present.

While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see:
Napalm girl
V-J Day Kiss
The burning monk
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
Tienanmen Square
Iwo Jima
Marylin Monroe on the subway grate
the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.

While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see:
Napalm girl
V-J Day Kiss
The burning monk
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
Tienanmen Square
Iwo Jima
Marylin Monroe on the subway grate
the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.

While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see:
Napalm girl
V-J Day Kiss
The burning monk
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
Tienanmen Square
Iwo Jima
Marylin Monroe on the subway grate
the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.

While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see:
Napalm girl
V-J Day Kiss
The burning monk
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
Tienanmen Square
Iwo Jima
Marylin Monroe on the subway grate
the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.

While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see:
Napalm girl
V-J Day Kiss
The burning monk
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
Tienanmen Square
Iwo Jima
Marylin Monroe on the subway grate
the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.

While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see:
Napalm girl
V-J Day Kiss
The burning monk
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
Tienanmen Square
Iwo Jima
Marylin Monroe on the subway grate
the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.

While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see:
Napalm girl
V-J Day Kiss
The burning monk
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
Tienanmen Square
Iwo Jima
Marylin Monroe on the subway grate
the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.

While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see:
Napalm girl
V-J Day Kiss
The burning monk
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
Tienanmen Square
Iwo Jima
Marylin Monroe on the subway grate
the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.

While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see:
Napalm girl
V-J Day Kiss
The burning monk
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
Tienanmen Square
Iwo Jima
Marylin Monroe on the subway grate
the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.

Typical mission times for Near Earth Asteroids in good orbits is 2-3 years. That's going out, grabbing dirt off the surface of an asteroid, and coming back. You can use Lunar gravity assist in both directions, which reduces the acceleration time on the electric propulsion. Current ion thrusters are too small for mining tugs. What you want are 200 kW plasma thrusters, like the VASIMR, and gang up 5 of them for 1 MW total power. That gives you 28.5 N @ 1 AU, sufficient to accelerate a loaded tug (1000 tons payload, 35 tons tug) at 2.38 m/s/day or 868 m/s/year. Most of the time is consumed on the return trip, since the tug is vastly heavier then. On the outbound leg the tug can achieve 68 m/s/day, and do all the required delta-V in a month or so. You would choose asteroids and orbit positions so as to minimize the return leg, and just accept a less efficient outbound leg.

If you think 1 MW is a lot of solar power, modern solar panels the size of the ones on the Space Station (400 square meters) can produce 165 kW each, so six of them in a hexagon around the tug core can do it. By comparison the Space Station has eight main panels.

The main asteroid belt is 1.1 to 2.3 AU from Earth ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... ). The "Near Earth" group are by definition within 0.3 AU, so that's the ones you start with. They don't have water as ice, it's too hot that near the Sun. What they have is hydrated minerals, which release the water when heated to 200-300C. An example of a hydrated mineral is kaolinite, which has the formula Al2Si2O5(OH)4. It is a major component of clay on Earth. The OH's are what get driven off in the form of water vapor.

Hauling ice from beyond the "frost line" (2.8 AU), where average temperatures are low enough for ice to be stable, is certainly a possibility, but not for the early years of space mining. It's just too far away. There's lots and lots of water beyond the frost line, because Oxygen is the 3rd most common element, after Hydrogen and Helium, and water is H2O.

Slashdot is a news aggregation site. Ostensibly for 'News for nerds, stuff that matters' at founding. In practice is was a blog for Rob Malda, CmdrTaco. It was also a website with an accidentally really good commenting technology.

Been around long enough to see the jokes about not reading the article? Then you have probably been around long enough to see the argument that a lot of the people still visiting the site do so for the conversation in the articles. They provide everything from group-think arguments, good counter-arguments and funny jokes about the topic to warnings about click-bait, pay-wall free options and corrected sources.

If Slashdot had ever depended upon the quality of the articles it would have failed when it was still Chips-n-Dips hosted on a university student account. The commenting system is more than a chance to keep up your HTML skillz. People in the know are really providing the value. (Queue complaints about Facebook's model, etc.) However, getting quality articles is important to attracting the readership that does not know about the site.

For instance, this article currently doesn't shows up in Google search for annoying LEDs, being a day old. But the top link is for lifehacks.stackexchange.com for whatever reason. Stackechange and Amazon dominate the front page. I almost feel sorry for companies with products on that page. Even with no such thing as bad marketing, being known for having annoying lights on your non-party-joke product is not a good thing.

The Blue LED backlash article on McConnell's blog is page three. And he discusses a vendor that sells low intensity LEDs for computer products. But I expect - or at least hope - this slashdot article to make it to at least page three with McConnell's blog if not higher.

"fewer" distributions... LOL. https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

under a new name

There is of course some truth to what you say. Also, people actually believe things too, sometimes passionately. For one example, Al Gore believes that global warming is BOTH a good career tool AND an actual concern. The USSR actually tried to put nukes 90 miles from Florida, and politicians used that fact to their own advantage.

> Do you know what would have happened to the USSR had capitalism taken over? Not much really.

It's interesting to me how often people predict the past. Russia DID move to a market economy in the 1990s. GDP and personal incomes roughly doubled, after a turbulent transition period.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

They didn't set out to make a partial upper deck. The original plan was to make it a full double-decker like Airbus eventually did with the A380. But given their deadline, they didn't think they could solve the problem of adding (safe) evacuation slides for passengers on the upper deck in time, so they settled for a traditional single-decker (which they already had experience designing, just needed to scale everything up to make it wider). The short blister on top for the cockpit was added to allow the cargo variant to have a swing nose so you could load cargo through the front, instead of through the side. So it's not really "copying" someone else's design when there's only one practical solution (the impractical one being putting the cockpit in the swing-away nose and designing all sorts of latches for the mechanical linkages between the cockpit controls to the plane's control surfaces).

This is why the upper deck on the early 747-100 is a lot shorter than in later variants like the 747-400. The few upper-deck seats on the 747-100 were an afterthought, added more for novelty than for increased passenger capacity. The lower deck on the 747 already carried nearly 3x as many passengers as any other plane operating at the time. Boeing tried for decades to sell the idea of a full double-deck 747 to the airlines, but not enough of them would commit to them. So Boeing never bothered making it. When Airbus announced their plans for the A380, Boeing tried again to pitch a full double-deck 747, and again not enough airlines said they wanted it. That's why they didn't try to compete with Airbus on the A380.

Production of the A380 will probably soon cease, and its sales have just barely recouped its design costs. The 4-engine airliners like the 747, A340, and A380 are being eaten alive in the market by twin-engine airliners like the 777, 787, and A350 (2 engines are more efficient than 4). The disparity between A380 orders and deliveries is mostly due to airlines which placed orders but have asked to delay delivery or have refused receipt as they consider cancelling. Airbus needs to produce about 20-25 a year for the production facilities alone (i.e. excluding design costs) to operate without losing money. And right now they're scheduled to drop to 12 deliveries/year in 2018, so they'll probably wind up losing money on the A380 overall (the remaining 100 or so orders will probably be delivered at a loss, if they're not canceled outright). So it would appear Boeing's market analysis was correct that there wasn't enough market demand for a full double-deck airliner. It's a good thing the EU government guaranteed the loans Airbus took out to design the plane or this might've bankrupted the company. Competition between Airbus and Boeing is what keeps technology progressing and prices low.

They didn't set out to make a partial upper deck. The original plan was to make it a full double-decker like Airbus eventually did with the A380. But given their deadline, they didn't think they could solve the problem of adding (safe) evacuation slides for passengers on the upper deck in time, so they settled for a traditional single-decker (which they already had experience designing, just needed to scale everything up to make it wider). The short blister on top for the cockpit was added to allow the cargo variant to have a swing nose so you could load cargo through the front, instead of through the side. So it's not really "copying" someone else's design when there's only one practical solution (the impractical one being putting the cockpit in the swing-away nose and designing all sorts of latches for the mechanical linkages between the cockpit controls to the plane's control surfaces).

This is why the upper deck on the early 747-100 is a lot shorter than in later variants like the 747-400. The few upper-deck seats on the 747-100 were an afterthought, added more for novelty than for increased passenger capacity. The lower deck on the 747 already carried nearly 3x as many passengers as any other plane operating at the time. Boeing tried for decades to sell the idea of a full double-deck 747 to the airlines, but not enough of them would commit to them. So Boeing never bothered making it. When Airbus announced their plans for the A380, Boeing tried again to pitch a full double-deck 747, and again not enough airlines said they wanted it. That's why they didn't try to compete with Airbus on the A380.

Production of the A380 will probably soon cease, and its sales have just barely recouped its design costs. The 4-engine airliners like the 747, A340, and A380 are being eaten alive in the market by twin-engine airliners like the 777, 787, and A350 (2 engines are more efficient than 4). The disparity between A380 orders and deliveries is mostly due to airlines which placed orders but have asked to delay delivery or have refused receipt as they consider cancelling. Airbus needs to produce about 20-25 a year for the production facilities alone (i.e. excluding design costs) to operate without losing money. And right now they're scheduled to drop to 12 deliveries/year in 2018, so they'll probably wind up losing money on the A380 overall (the remaining 100 or so orders will probably be delivered at a loss, if they're not canceled outright). So it would appear Boeing's market analysis was correct that there wasn't enough market demand for a full double-deck airliner. It's a good thing the EU government guaranteed the loans Airbus took out to design the plane or this might've bankrupted the company. Competition between Airbus and Boeing is what keeps technology progressing and prices low.

Other than the fact that companies had prototypes back in 2004. And they've come a long way in 10 years. Another 10 years now that it's near commercialized and out of research think tanks and by 2024 there are going to be multiple on the road offered by multiple companies.

A cat's face as intellectual property? As a trademark, I could understand. Not as a work of art.

I have some folks here who disagrees:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q1n2...

http://ep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/madi...

http://totallyhistory.com/wp-c...

No, it looks almost identical to Windows 2000. Compare:

- Windows 2000
- ReactOS

Maybe distance from birth and proximity to death are strongly correlated for humans above age 20?

Actually, did you not know the Minoan Warm Period, Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm period were warmer than today?

No I didn't know that, mostly because they're not. Here's a graph:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

See how the global temperature is not in fact warmer during the medieval warm period?

This is why Vikings farmed in Greenland and.... ... and yada yada yada it was warmer in the North Atlantic. We know. The North Atlantic is not the world. This is why it's called *global* warming. And the globe is warmer now than it was then.

You talk about 'nutters' yet seem to be defending a position for which you don't even understand even the basic counter evidence

The irony burns so bad I think my screen is about to melt.

http://green-agenda.com/

I'll bet that website has no agenda!

There already was a contest for a new Firefox logo. This one was the winner. Why not continue on in that theme and have the mozilla dinosaur head encased in a glacier or something?

You could stare into its dead eyes and relive memories of a once glorious past.

The excuse might be that there's a La Nina event

You do realise that El Nino/La Nina events aren't post-hoc justifications invented by "alarmists", but are an actual measure of ocean current and temperature patterns called the Southern Oscillation Index?

Like two little boys fighting in a sack.

They should totally do a remake of this advertisement.

Coins suck.

We have ACA, and it's failing.

Our streets have names. Dumb names, but names nonetheless. And addresses actually make sense here.

Belief in God is a personal choice, not a governmental one. Anyone that wants to enforce otherwise had better be well-armed.

Really? Football? You're going to argue over this, even though you're wrong? Rugby and "Association" (a.k.a. Soccer) are both types of football. NFL-style football is a variation of Rugby. Get over it.

Drive-on-left is a British Empire thing. Continental Europe is mostly sane and drives on the right, just like the US. If you're going to laugh at the US as one of the last remaining countries to officially use imperial units, then you're a hypocrite if you don't laugh at Commonwealth countries (and one oddly backwards area of Africa) for drive-on-left. Surely, if you're a reasonable person, you must see similarities in those maps.

It was six years ago. I was sitting on the pillow-strewn floor of a pub in a quiet corner of the world, spliff smoldering in the ashtray as I nursed my beer, when in the doorway appeared my Viking pal leading a billy goat. Or so I thought. When the goat removed its shoes and walked into the pub, it dawned on me that this was no goat. They sat down, we were introduced, and so I met Necky McBeardface. If you recall, this was back when Necky and his Buccaneer Besties were pretending to hide their chest of free booty maps up in the Hermit Kingdom for teh lulz. But I digress.

First thing out of Necky’s mouth (post-introduction) was something about x86 assembly. I corrected him, and he said “that was the joke”. Embarrassing, I guess. We chatted about the large amounts of gold the different Viking chieftains were demanding should the ting decide against him. He seemed bemused rather than concerned over the amounts, but we didn’t have an extradition treaty with the Vikings, so his lack of concern was understandable.

Last I saw Necky, he was at a billiard table playing with himself in another pub, just around the corner from The Pirate Bar on the quay.